Lockheed, Atlanta, and the Struggle for Racial Integration by Randall L. Patton;

Author:Randall L. Patton; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-10-01T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

“The Competitive Economic Advantages of Having an Excellent Minority Hiring Record”

THE BANKS CASE AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1966–1972

The employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act took effect on July 1, 1965. Approximately eight months later, African American Lockheed employees began filing discrimination charges with the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Among the complainants were longtime workers such as Ernest Ross and Willie Elkins. More than fifty complaints filtered into the Atlanta EEOC office, headed by civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell, between March and December 1966. The agency began serving notice of the charges to Lockheed in September and continued through January 1967. The EEOC office reported its findings in September 1967.1 The charges and investigation led to an addendum to Lockheed’s original plan for progress, ongoing efforts to reach conciliation agreements with the complainants, and eventually to a lawsuit, trial, and settlement in 1972. Lockheed’s voluntary efforts collided with the new compulsory provisions of the Civil Rights Act, while changing business conditions complicated the implementation of affirmative action strategies.

According to the EEOC’S September 1967 report, Lockheed was “the largest defense contractor in the United States.” The Georgia division employed 23,365 workers, of whom 1,463 (about 6 percent) were black, a far lower ratio than that of metropolitan Atlanta’s overall population, which was 22.8 percent African American. Some employees alleged that they had been denied specific positions for which they were at least as qualified as whites who received similar promotions, but in essence, the charges boiled down “to the fact that Negroes, as a class, are not treated equally with whites” in terms of promotions among both salaried and hourly workers. Blacks held salaried positions in only 44 of Lockheed-Georgia’s 366 departments. Meanwhile, “several thousand other salaried employees,” none of them African American, worked in the many remaining departments. Overall, African Americans could be found in only 27 of 925 salaried job classifications within the plant. Blacks were represented in just 183 of 652 hourly job classifications and as hourly workers in only 115 departments. Even when counting just the departments that had black salaried employees, African Americans occupied less than 3 percent of such jobs. The complaints against Lockheed also targeted the International Association of Machinists, which now operated on an integrated basis but had no African American “officers, business representatives, or clerical personnel.”2

The report detailed the company’s promotion procedures. A Management Development and Selection Department had developed a “complex screening process.” When vacancies for salaried positions occurred, department managers forwarded requests to higher-level managers, who in turn forwarded requests to the Management Development and Selection Department. The department then sent a list of what it considered qualified candidates to a Placement Committee, which would make a final decision, subject to the veto or approval of the department manager. In keeping with the original 1961 plan for progress, Lockheed “employ[ed] a representative to ‘identify’ qualified Negro candidates.” The EEOC determined that at a minimum, this procedure needed significant refinement and enhancement.3

The Management Development and Selection Department screened

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.